Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers Special
July 11, 2020
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July 11, 2020
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have a couple of personal announcements and some links of special interest to writers.
First, I recently came across an article by popular crime author Dennis Lehane praising the late great Elmore Leonard, who wrote dozens of genre novels and stories, many made into movies you've probably heard of: "Three-Ten to Yuma;" Mr. Majestyk; Get Shorty, Raylan (became the TV series Justified). It's not surprising that a writer like Lehane, whose work is thick with corruption and violence, would praise Leonard, but this article talks about how Leonard's real interest is character, and how his mode of working is through story rather than plot. Lehane makes the distinction in a useful way that I think all novel writers should consider. Find the article here.
Next, and this is somewhere between useful and personal sharing, I have a brief video just out from Commaful.com offering some thoughts on revision plus three specific exercises. You can find the video here.
Then there is my personal addition to summer reading options! My new science fiction novel Soledad in the Desert has just been published by Montemayor Press and is available from all the usual suspects (see below for alternatives to Amazon and Kindle, if you're so inclined). The novel is a prequel to my first science fiction book The City Built of Starships.
Soledad in the Desert
Read a sample here.
As a prequel to the Meredith Sue Willis's acclaimed sci-fi novel The City Built of Starships, this tale relates the adventures of a girl reaching womanhood while living in "the world with two suns." Soledad, intelligent and strong-willed, must make sense of life and love in a stark quasi-Buddhist community attempting to survive on an alien planet. She succeeds -- but just barely.
Soledad faces multiple challenges in The Encampment, the isolated, cult-like group of refugees who fled The City Built of Starships years ago. The larger community -- the result of earthlings having emigrated from the home planet several generations earlier -- started out as an organized effort to colonize what they call the Second World. But the new settlement quickly degenerated into a brutal class system: dominant Officers holding sway over subordinate Hands. Resisting this hierarchy, a band of rebels sought desert solitude to escape tyranny and to follow a meditative Path. Young Soledad, growing up in this community and now approaching adulthood, must make sense of herself and her place in a dangerous world. She finds solace in friendships with a few peers and, especially, in her interactions with the aboriginal sentient beings called yaegers. Little by little she understands both the limits to her freedom and a way to follow her own path.
Soledad in the Desert presents both a fully realized alternate reality and a thoughtful, observant protagonist intent on finding her place in a world that often makes no sense but nonetheless presents an intelligent young woman with opportunities to find meaning.
ISBN-13: 978-1932727425
Order online from Bookshop.org or amazon.com.
E-book available from smashwords.com or from kindle.
To order by mail, go to Orders.
You may also visit your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
Read a sample here.
And finally, I want to alert you to one more publication by me coming out in just a few weeks--a novella in book form set in southern West Virginia:
Saving Tyler Hake
The publisher says, "At the only high school in a small southern West Virginia county, there is an uproar over the death of the father of a tenth grade student, and the troubling reaction from the boy, Tyler Hake, who shows up at school with a blood-soaked shirt.
" The teachers, many of whom went to this same high school where they now teach, attend the funeral of Tyler's father, who was also their classmate growing up. To everyone's surprise, another classmate, Geneva, also shows up at the funeral after having been gone for decades–and she clearly wants to be left alone.
The teachers' thoughts turn to the past, hoping to find explanations for their own actions and perhaps clues to help Tyler."
Thank you for your time!
May you all stay healthy and move forward in these strange days with caution and hopeful hearts!
NOW!!
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LICENSE
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
